Saturday, June 27, 2009

"In recent years, several States have guaranteed gay and lesbian couples the freedom to marry as a basic civil right."

Right off, I feel nauseous reading this opening volley in the current Justice Department's Brief filed in the US District Court Case challenging the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act." It sickens me since I know where this is leading.

This is how you start an argument against same-sex marriage as a basic civil right?

It is the height of cynicism, worthy of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or George W. Himself, to assert that the issue at the bottom of all this is no issue at all - and never was.

This business about "several States [having] guaranteed same-sex couples the freedom to marry" sets the disingenuous tone of this argument, which is carried through the entire brief:

"You uppity perverts should just shut the hell up and be grateful that a few backward states have so graciously - but wrongly - granted you the right to offend us 'real' Americans with your existence and to mock our real marriages-made-in-heaven with your godless fake ones!"

Such heartfelt sentiment was to be expected from the Bush Administration. But - appallingly - it seems to have spilled over into the allegedly gay-friendly Obama Justice Department.

It is, in fact, partly the work of one W. Scott Simpson, a Bush holdover (Mormon by coincidence?) who is named as Senior Trial Counsel on page 1 of the brief filed June 11, 2009.

Since that filing just weeks ago, other Repugnicans have used different language to convey the same sentiment and to advance the same political agenda. In Pennsylvania, for instance, State Sen. John Eichelberger (R. Bumphuk County), has introduced a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the commonwealth. When asked in an NPR interview if the state's only policy toward same-sex couples should be to punish them, Eichelberger relied on his Repugnican talking point cheat sheet to declare, "They're not being punished! WE'RE ALLOWING THEM TO EXIST," damn it!

No big surprise, perhaps, in the land of "man-on-dog" Santorum to hear a Repugnican saying such things out loud. But what the hell is the Obama Administration and a Democratic-controlled Justice Department doing using those same talking points in a case against DOMA? Isn't this is one of the federal benchmarks of institutionalized homophobia that Obama vowed to use the full force of his office to repeal?

Fanning the flames of outrage over Obama's crass betrayal of his LGBT supporters on this key issue was the Administration's quick response to the initial uproar that only began to surround it. Disturbingly, vocal criticism of this action was quelled by deft political manipulation of the media by Obama's White House response team.

Due to the tedious legal language of this motion it took a few days for anybody to digest and convey to the rest of us how truly damaging its implications are to the struggle for LGBT civil rights. A few days was time enough, however, for Obama and his handlers to smack together a headline-grabbing proclamation of some "positive" crumb they could toss out there to distract their fuming LGBT constituency while at the same time not draw too much blow-back from the repugnant right. What they came up with and announced with enthusiastic fanfare is that partners of LGBT federal employees will now be eligible for spousal benefits!

Flash! Boom! Brilliant! Take a bow, Mr. President. A grateful queer nation thanks you for allowing us to exist in your government. And the Repugnicans of 2009, having become inured to our existence on this planet, will raise no fuss since this small gesture is clearly devoid of any meaning or substance and it can just as easily be undone.

The Fed's granting of spousal benefits is not just mimicking what most private sector employers of any size have already been doing for decades. It is actually just little more than a totally empty gesture since it lacks the single most important measure granted by other employers - health insurance coverage! (I don't know what LGBT spouses do get out of the new acknowledgment of their existence - maybe an invitation to the annual employee picnic?)

But the maneuver worked. The media bought it, hook line and stinker! Nary a peep in the press about how the LGBT civil rights movement may be set back by decades if Obama allows the offensive action of his Justice Department to go forward and if it succeeds in supporting the constitutionality of DOMA. And now, if the straight majority catches any word about the LGBT population being at all upset with our liberal President then WE come off looking like a bunch of whiney ingrates!

There is so much wrong with this deeply offensive motion and the politics surrounding it. So much has been written about it already by legal scholars and critics, some of whom are ardent LGBT Obama supporters. If the President does not soon and strongly disavow it (preferably firing Simpson and Co. in the process) then we can only assume that this is where his true sentiments lie. Regardless of the elegant lip service he pays to us when he needs our votes we will have to see him as being no more enlightened than the most repugnant Bush Administration official.

How can we not feel as though we've been made fools of again?

The crass cynicism of the motion does not stop with opening clause, of course. It carries all through the long and twisted brief painting a background scenario of the issues in the dankest tradition of historical revisionism. Reading through the motion you are asked to suspend your disbelief and ignore the turbulent experience that brought us same-sex lovers to this contentious point in our long struggle for equal rights. You are, in effect, asked to swallow the fantastical idea that the State legislatures of this great nation have spent the last decade or so reasonably and civilly considering the idea of encoding same-sex marriage into their laws on a benevolent "experimental" basis.

In this Bizarro World scenario it was not a hard-fought civil rights trench battle - declared a "culture war" on "perversion" by opportunistic Religio-pugnicans in the 1980s - that has actually raged on the public scene for over forty years. We have not been oppressed by ignorance and hatred for centuries, or claim to have ever been victims of mass violence, murder and often driven to suicide. We were never a people forced to deny our deep personal identities and conform impossibly to societal roles enforced by the tyranny of majority opinion. And we are not now forced to accept an inferior legal status steeped in religious tradition and other irrational forms of prejudice.

It is, in fact, only a deep but baseless sense of heterosexual entitlement that continues to deny homosexuals our rights to life, liberty and our pursuit of happiness as American citizens. Homosexual activity was decriminalized in America in 2003 but homosexuals in relationships are still oppressed by the assumed supremacy of those who claim to be purely heterosexual. But this boast is obviously a lie perpetrated even by self-righteous closet cases who enforce it until caught having homosexual relations themselves.

The sense of this brief in support of DOMA is that our benevolent state governments, in their wisdom, voluntarily looked down upon their citizenry and discovered that people were forming "nontraditional" relationships among themselves. The states apparently saw this and wondered how they could help us. Their approach was to be "cautious" so as to preserve the peace of the land by not upsetting those citizens who might not understand. A few states were chosen or volunteered to act as "laboratories" where the novel concept of tolerance would be tested using those poor misguided souls who wanted to "marry" each other (for goodness sakes!) as guinea pigs.

After the opening clause, this is how that concept is introduced in the Justice Department's motion:

"Yet, as same-sex couples in these States have won what they understandably view as a vital personal right of surpassing importance to their happiness and well-being, other States have reaffirmed the traditional understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife, an understanding held as a matter of profound moral and religious conviction by many of their citizens."

Since this is a case against the federal government, the Obama Feds are arguing that it should be dismissed on the grounds that the States, in taking on this "experiment in alternate forms of marriage," effectively relieved the federal government of any responsibility for its citizens in regard to marriage. It's the usual Repugnican cop-out, mouthed even by former VP Darth Cheney, that it should be up to the states to decide whether his lesbian daughter can have what he takes for granted as a non-lesbian everywhere across this country (think he really believes that?).

The most infuriating thing about all this is that the Feds did not HAVE to do or say anything concerning this case. Rather than going to the disgusting lengths they did - later using the tired old repugnancy of equating homosexual activity to incest, bestiality and child abuse - they did not need to file a brief at all. The original case, Smelt & Hammer v. USA, is a very weak one. It was never our best chance to defeat DOMA and it could be thrown out of court still on purely technical grounds.

The hearing for Obama's motion for dismissal of this suit is scheduled for August 3, 2009.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Since last Wednesday, June 10, I have been operating with blinders on, working on a super big deal deadline-driven project that required me to focus! focus! focus! for my day job. For six days I dutifully blocked out all background noise: TV off. No radio or newspaper. Only an occasional glimpse at the fleeting news alerts that popped up in my email, which I noticed when I had to check in to see if any communications had come in from the folks I was working with on this heavy loaded thing. The only time I was able to tear myself away from this task was when I could no longer focus my eyes and found myself stretching my fingers in pain and still hitting the wrong keys on the keyboard. When that happened I would creak away from my desk and plopped down in bed for a few hours rest only to jump back into the fire when I woke up.

You get the picture.

So, now that all that is behind me (for the most part) and I am ready to start catching up on those lost and foggy days, what happens? I find out that, during my work-induced stupor the equivalent of a freakin' nuclear bomb was dropped on this country's LGBT population. It happened last Friday!

How did I miss it? Where were the outraged queers I would expect to hear screaming in the street, their angry cries piercing the air and blasting through my apartment windows?

Our hope is lost! Obama has betrayed us!

His Justice Department mowed LGBT America down last week: kicked us to the curb, burned us to a crisp with the brief they filed in a suit brought against DOMA. A suit they came out on the wrong side of. OUR President, Mr. Hope and Bliss, who had pledged to destroy the hated beast, DOMA, has done worse than turn on us. With no warning or even a simple "by your leave," he has apparently joined forces with those who feed and worship the DOMA dragon that lives for one purpose and one purpose only - to crush us, the American LGBT population.

I can't bring myself to read too much about this disaster as my work is not yet completely done and this just pisses me off so bad that I am already STEAMING way too much about it. I cannot afford this upsetting imposition on my time just yet.

The best thing I could think of doing was to ignore most of the reports that are streaming through the cybersphere and to go right to the source so I could see for myself what it is that has everyone on the net buzzing with righteous outrage. I located a copy of the brief and began to read through it and - god damn it!!! - It's bad. Really really bad. I can't begin to think about how ripping angry I will get when I have the time.

In a couple of days, when I CAN afford to start processing this catastrophe, they are going to hear from me. Oh boy, are they gonna get a letter! Obama first. And then the boneheaded jerks who put their names to this brief - some nobody called Tony West (such a gay name!), who is Assitant Attorney General, and James J. Gilligan, Assistant Director (Little Buddy? Is this a joke?). Their names appear right under "Respectfully submitted" on the official Obama Adminstration brief, viewable at "Obama's Motion to Dismiss Marriage case."

Also taking responsibility for this brief is another big nobody, W. Scott Simpson, (Doh!) Senior Trial Counsel. His email is even listed right on the brief, scott.simpson@usdoj.gov and fax: (202) 676-8470. And phone: (202) 514-3495.

If anyone has the kind of time I don't have right now and if they want to vent their anger over this shit as much as I do, well, it seems like this guy is just asking for it by putting his contact information out there.

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The Roots of "The Culture Wars" written November, 2008

At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan lobbed the first explicit attack on modernity, officially declaring a War on Culture in America.

Seizing the RNC podium and appropriating the GOP mantel as a platform to wage his long-fantasized Culture War, Buchanan delivered a rousing speech that presumptively enlisted the support of that party under the leadership of first President Bush.

Buchanan denounced the "radical feminism" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's " agenda [that] would impose on America -- abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat -- that's change, all right," he said, "But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country."

Those words may ring familiar as they were echoed anew at the 2008 Republican National Convention, because the still powerful GOP continues to be a propitious vehicle for the marauding legions of backwardness and ignorance. They may have been defeated by and large in the latest round of national elections. But, to them, this was merely a set back and we can be sure they are already regrouping for their next assault on reason.

In the current transition back to a liberal Democratic Party-led government we must not allow ourselves to become complacent, over-confident or narrowly factional in our pursuit of a progressive realization of the Constitutional promise of freedom and equality for all of us.

Recall that, even after Buchanan called on his minions to support George the First that election went to Clinton. But they were far from defeated and eight years later they came roaring back with a vengeance by the name of George W. Bush.

If anyone thinks the reactionary Religious Right will just roll over and play dead while the Obama Administration does its best to clean up the phenomenal mess Bush left in his wake...